Monthly Archives: March 2016

Just a quick note now that 8.3.2 is now GA and here’s a few features that I may have missed in my combined post on 8.3.1 and 8.3.2 or the details of which just weren’t available to me. I’ll start by reiterating some of the highlights in point form:

Copy Free Transition (CFT)

In-line DeDupe (on AFF)

In-place, adaptive compression

Those were some of the more poignant features, but here’s some others that I either didn’t know about or just weren’t to me:

MetroCluster distance increased by 50% bringing it to 300KM

Oracle NFS workload provisioning for All Flash FAS (AFF)

Using a Quick Start guide, and a wizard in the on-board OnCommand System Manager, the claim is you can have your new AFF cabled and serving Oracle over NFS in under 15 minutes.

The real beauty in this release however is in regards to CFT. I’ve said it before, but I’m still impressed by this feature. Basically you can stand up a new cDOT system with it’s own root aggregates and connect your 7-mode disk to it (yes there’s caveats) and with some 7MTT magic smoke, your data is now being served out of your shiny, new cluster-mode environment. Previously 7MTT (7-mode Transition Tool) only supported source data in the 8.1.x code line, but with this new release, 7MTT now supports 7-Mode systems running Data ONTAP 8.1.4P4 – 8.1.4P9 and Data ONTAP 8.2.1 or later. Also, in 8.3.2RC, CFT would only work on a net-new system with only its root aggregates, but in the 8.3.2GA, CFT now supports importing your 7-mode disk on to 8.3.2GA systems with pre-existing data aggregates and volumes. Here are all the permutations that you can now leverage CFT to import your 7-mode data:

Import 7-Mode disk shelves in the following ways:

Import disk shelves from a 7-Mode HA pair to a new HA pair in a new cluster.

Import disk shelves from a 7-Mode HA pair to a new HA pair in an existing cluster that has additional data-serving nodes.

Import disk shelves from a 7-Mode HA pair to an HA pair that has data aggregates in an existing cluster that is serving data.

Import disk shelves from an HA pair that contains volumes in a volume SnapMirror relationship to an HA pair in a new or existing cluster.
You must manually create the cluster peer relationship after transition; however, a rebaseline transfer is not required, and you can retain the SnapMirror relationship after transition.

*UPDATE: The above is actually more a function of 7MTT 2.3, but you need it for CFT anyway.

For all the gory details of CFT and how awesome it is, go here for your copy of the Copy-Free Transition Guide.

What does all this actually mean? It means that soon we can finally stop referring to “it” as either 7-mode or cluster-mode and just refer to “it” as ONTAP or Data ONTAP again.

Last year I gained access to an arcade cabinet that had been outfitted with a standard consumer PC running Windows and being the front end to a handful of emulators. The cabinet itself is actually a custom build, not a repurposed one from years ago. This was purchased from Arcade Time Machine and it is pretty awesome. That however is not the point of this post, what I am doing is tracing back the root of my RaspberryPi obsession. Talking about the cabinet with some co-workers, they were telling me that you can do all of that on a RaspberryPi, and there was actually a community around exactly that. The “solution” is called RetroPie and you can read more about that over there. I quickly visited Amazon and put together a list of components which included the following:

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

Power Supply and Case

SD Card

WiFi dongle

HDMI Cable

2 × Logitech F710 gaming controllers

Logitech K400 wireless keyboard

Pretty much everything I needed to get my own RetroPie gaming system up and running at home.

Talking with various co-workers around the country over our internal Slack, I found that apparently one guy had built his RetroPie and everyone else had pretty much just gotten an image of his SD card. I decided that I would also go down this route. I got the image burnt and after a bit of tweaking I had a mostly functioning system. I played some of the old 8-bit games that I used to love, Pyros, Shinobi and Mario Brothers to name a few. Some things just didn’t work how I wanted them to however, so I figured I’d have to build my own RetroPie image. While I haven’t tried installing the RetroPie packages on top of Raspbian myself yet, that is the next step. Currently my Pi boots into RetroPie using the image you can download from RetroPie directly but I just can’t get it to work and I think it’s because I don’t know enough about what’s going on behind the GUIs and the only way to figure it out is to install everything myself and not rely on an image file.

Between the co-worker-supplied image and now however, I’ve done a few other things with my Pi. One of the neat things you can do with it is turn it into a digital media set-top box that can replace or supplement your AppleTV, Chromecast or Roku. I did this by installing Kodi (formerly XBMC) on it. Now I was already using XBMC on my jailbroken ATV2, so I already had some expectations which it pretty much met. The Pi however appears to run Kodi much faster than the ATV2, possibly due to it being newer, faster hardware. I don’t really know or care actually as it was only a test and I still rely on my ATV2 for day-to-day viewing, at least until I buy a supplementary Pi to devote to this. As a bit of a side note, I’ve also been using Plex on my QNAP TS-653 via my Chromecast which is even more slick than Kodi so that may end up being my end solution anyway.

The thing that really got me excited about my Pi is the ability to leverage the GPIO pins to do things outside of the Pi. I’ve always had an interest in coding and have even done a bunch of Python back in the day, since this is the preferred language for those hacking on the Pi, this was quite convenient. So I ordered myself a starter kit of sorts. Don’t order that one for your Pi2 though, it comes with the wrong extension board, this one is for the original Pi. When it arrived and I realize I had ordered the wrong part, a quick trip to Lee’s Electronics and I was in business. I did what most people do and I wrote the Hello World of the Pi and hardware hacking world, I made some LEDs blink:

I continued to play with LEDs for a while, writing various python functions to make them blink in different orders but I soon grew bored and decided I needed to try another one of the external pieces of kit that I had, so I figured the 16 × 2 character display was a good next step. This was actually quite easy, so after I figured it out, I quickly whipped together some code to wish my good friend Jason a happy birthday since it happened to be the day I was working on this:

Using a 16 × 2 character display with the RaspberryPi.

The next thing I did was attach a DS18B20 temperature sensor because now I had a project in mind. I started with some code that displayed the current temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit to both the terminal as well as to the character display, I then added logging to it and removed the character display code. Lately I’ve been finding that my bedroom is a little warm at night, so I figured I could deploy the Pi as a temperature logging device and figure out if the room was actually getting hot or if I’m just eating too much salt or drinking too much red wine; after all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. That’s where my Pi currently sits, powered up in the bedroom logging the temperature to a CSV file every five minutes and has been doing so for about three days. I have yet to come up with my next project, but I do know that I want/need at least one more Pi since my son Jordan has been playing with the Pi as well. I wouldn’t want to hinder his ability to play with it and learn because I’m hogging it for the same purpose. Also, since the Pi3 is now out, I would like to have that model if only for the built-in WiFi. I’m still not done with the RetroPie project, but I am a little frustrated by it so more to come on that one in the future.

Feel free to suggest any fun projects that I may want to take on, I have a new soldering station on the way from Amazon and am looking for something cool to do with it.

I’m going to start to deviate from my usual NetApp-centric posts and just talk about what I’ve been up to on the geeky side of Chris. Out of the very limited list of podcasts I listen to, one of them is The Geek Whisperers which focuses not on specific technologies but rather on personal and professional advancement from a Geek’s point of view. Due to my association with the NetApp A-Team and NetApp’s acquisition of Solid Fire, I was lucky enough to find myself on a call with the inspirational Amy Lewis, a.k.a. CommsNinja, one of the hosts of TGW. We were discussing social media, personal development and other such things. Amy made a comment about how people should be blogging about more things that they’re interested in because you never know which members of your readership may have the same interests and it may also draw in new readers.

While the term Geek used to mean either “an unfashionable or socially inept person.” or “a carnival performer who performs wild or disgusting acts.”, these are no longer the de-facto definitions. These days, Geek will often refer to someone who “engages in or discusses computer-related tasks obsessively or with great attention to technical detail” and/or some who “is or becomes extremely excited or enthusiastic about a subject, typically one of specialist or minority interest”. It is definitely this latter one that me and my geek brethren identify with. While the stereotypical “geek” typically is also a “computer nerd”, I’m betting most, if not all of them have some pretty intense interest in some non-computer related hobbies as well. For example, here’s a list of interests I’ve obsessed over in the past five to ten years, some of which are current while others have passed or are waning.

Magic: The Gathering (This one is actually from about 20 years ago but has resurfaced now that I can play with my son)

This list is by no means exhaustive, but rather a glimpse into who I am. Personally, I find myself geeking out over so many different things, the hardest part about being a geek is finding the time to devote to such a plethora of hobbies, and then when something new comes up that strikes my fancy, finding time to fit that new one in. Maybe that’s what makes a geek a geek, someone who is willing to obsess over something that interests them until they get good at it or maybe a geek is just someone who loves to learn new things? I do find that often time my interests will somehow be related to the sciences in one way or another, be it math, physics or chemistry. I never thought I’d mention that last one until recently however when I started reading about soap making after a discussion about it with a newer co-worker; so stay tuned, there may be a soap making post in my future.

So why exactly am I posting this at all? Well I’m basically giving myself permission to post about whatever the heck I want, hopefully it’ll be enough to keep some people interested.